NYACK, N.Y. (SFF PR) — Today, the Republican Party released its 2012 platform, which included a provision entitled “America’s Future in Space: Continuing This Quest.” The non-partisan Space Frontier Foundation issued the following statement in response:NASA seems to be one Big Government program many Republicans love. The GOP platform criticizes the federal government as “bloated, antiquated and unresponsive to taxpayers” but has nothing but hackneyed praise for NASA, and doesn’t even mention the increasing role of the private sector. The authors of this platform must imagine they still live in the Cold War of the 1960s, when only governments launched payloads and people into space.The platform committee declares it “isn’t enough to merely downsize government, having a smaller version of the same failed systems,” that we need to “do things in a dramatically different way”-yet says nothing about the need to reform NASA or to streamline regulation of the emerging NewSpace sector. Republicans call themselves the Great Opportunity Party. Yet their Platform presumes “space” is a (government) program, instead of a frontier to be opened to the American people–the greatest “opportunity” since the West was settled.In the last eight years, the private space industry has taken off ...